


these pale and hungry scavengers

by kay_cricketed



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied Child Abuse, M/M, implied accidental child abuse of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 14:14:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16220768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_cricketed/pseuds/kay_cricketed
Summary: While they're in Cape Code, Ash navigates the loss of his brother and learns something new about Eiji.(And somewhere, somehow, perhaps Griffin Callenreese considers this to be the most fitting eulogy he could have asked for: some poetry, and that these two should meet and leave things such as boundaries to continents.)





	these pale and hungry scavengers

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place during the trip to Cape Code to see Ash's dad and rifle through Griff's things. Wow, I haven't written these two for _years_ (since the days of FF Net, I think), but since the anime has started, I've thought of nothing else. I took some liberties with Eiji's family. I realize it's not canon, but it's an idea I wanted to explore considering the pressure on some modern athletes and how Eiji's post-injury slump could have so easily been related to pre-existing anxieties.
> 
> Poems that Griff quotes from, respectively: Charles Bukowski's "Unblinking Grief" and Lisel Mueller's "Things."

At this time of year, Cape Cod is a lonely stretch of colorless water set against land that has never understood the futility of its vigil. As a boy, Ash had hated the sight of it: all that uncrossable ocean boxing him in, the monstrous sand dunes too weak to build on, a father who blamed his son for a mother’s mistakes. And more still to come. 

Now he’s older. He recognizes the landscape itself isn’t so bad, but his memories have soured it. Once that sour sets in, there’s no scrubbing the association clean.

Some things, you just live with. 

Dark is dampening the sky fast, and he’s sitting on the beach rubbing his fingers together—Griff’s photographs have left a greasy residue from being untouched for too long—watching the last blotted colors go cold. Ash doesn’t want to think about Griff, but he’s thinking about him anyway. There’s nowhere for this feeling to go. He wishes it could be stored, even erased, but it’s Ash’s brain that fucks with him the most, holds him hostage the longest. He’s remembering pitching a tent with Griff right here on this patch of pebbles and scrub, and how it had rained, and how Griff had rerouted the beads of water against the canvas with his fingertip. _I am a dish for your ashes,_ he said. _I am a fist for your vanished air._

Ash knows the poem. He knows the poet. But he still thinks of those words as Griff’s, as the words Griff gave to him.

The screen door to the cabin snaps shut. And then he remembers that Griff is dead, and this presence is only his ghost keeping pace with a soft heart that could’ve been his twin.

“So cold,” says Eiji. “This wind! You don’t want a jacket?”

Ash cranes his neck up. The gale’s got hold of Eiji’s tousled hair. “I’m not ready to go inside yet,” he says.

“Is it always this way?”

“What, the weather?”

“Not that,” says Eiji, holding himself. There’s red blistered across his ears already—it looks like someone’s bitten him. “It feels very… heavy.”

“I think that’s called reading the mood,” Ash says, although he also wonders if Eiji has some sense of the magnitude of this town to him. It wasn’t in New York that he’d seen the ugly cowardice of people, but here. Even without those memories, the horizon has always been an event horizon; the cries of the gulls are too hungry. 

“Ehh,” says Eiji in that way he does when he’s not sure he’s understood the English. “Well, as soon as we leave, we can both go back to refusing to go home.”

It still catches Ash by surprise—this newfound hook in his heart. The way it lashes at him, making pain a bright, complicated thing. His smile is reflexive. That’s a new thing, too.

“And how long do you think you can keep that up?” he asks.

“How long have you?”

“Years,” says Ash. “There’s nothing here for me, though. It’s not the same as it is for you. You must have parents… Your scholarship. A whole life.”

Eiji piles gracelessly onto the ground next to him, his fingers buried in his sleeves. Up close, the gray of the day and his ruddy flush compliment his dark eyes. “I do,” he says. “My mother and a younger sister. But my life—Ash, it was not so big as it is now, with you. I’ve only been in America such a short time, but…” He looks away, coaxing a knot of his hair behind an ear. “I can’t imagine it. Staying away from here.”

_From you_ , Ash thinks he means to say. 

Ash’s chest feels compressed. He stares out into the surf and works to silence his thoughts, which tangle uselessly, trying to find some way to make this piece fit with all of the others he’s handling. But there is nowhere to fit Eiji. Not in the grimy alleys, not in the sterile mansions, not between the sheets and not in his ragtag group of strays. He feels the same highly fissured longing to be close, but it’s an impossible pipe dream. He’s going to get Eiji _killed_. 

“Your dad?” he asks. He expects it to be a distraction, not a dig into something yet tender.

And maybe it isn’t, but when Eiji says, “Oh—somewhere in Shikoku, I think,” Ash regrets his carelessness.

“You think?” he asks, faux-casual.

Eiji looks at him.

“It is okay,” Eiji says, in a way that immediately calls Ash to attention because Eiji obviously _believes_ it but he also believes Ash _won’t_. “I haven’t seen him in—three years? I thought maybe when I turned eighteen—but he wouldn’t answer my calls. So I thought, I will wait until he…” He stops, uncertain, his gaze tracking from Ash’s and across the matted grass.

Ash is—he’s _offended_ , he realizes, right on the tiptoes of when it hits him. There is nothing that—there’s nothing _wrong_ with Eiji. He’s kind, thoughtful, polite: the perfect son. He’s not like Ash. He’s not damaged. The shine is on him like a new penny and being kicked around some hasn’t dulled it at all.

“I think he’s ashamed,” Eiji confesses.

“Of what? Eiji, you’re…” His tongue gets tied up. Anything he says feels like it’ll only give him away.

“Not of me,” says Eiji, hunching into his raised knees. “Of—of why he had to leave home. Even though it was my fault. Some of it.”

Ash stares at him. He doesn’t know how to touch this Eiji, tucking himself into something small and fortressed. But he wants to touch him. He wants to press against the line of his thigh and hip and shoulder until they’re seamless. He wants to slide his knuckles across the back of Eiji’s neck and get an arm around him. The things Ash wants—god, they’ll fucking eat him alive. They’re never anything he’s _allowed_.

“It couldn’t have been your fault,” he says, because that’s something true. It has to be.

Eiji shrugs. “He was coaching me. He was very proud. I’d never done anything that made him that proud before. And so I tried very hard. Jumping, there is nothing like it. I _wanted_ to work hard, to spend all my time in the sky. But sometimes it wasn’t… enough."

It isn’t as bad as Ash’s fears, but it’s bad enough. “He pushed you too hard,” Ash says, analyzing the words in between the spoken ones and letting his intuition fill in the gaps. “ _You_ pushed you too hard. Someone noticed. The authorities?”

“The police didn’t have to do anything. My mother sent him away in the end.” Sighing, Eiji rests his chin on his folded hands and looks out over the last light caught across the water. “I don’t understand him. I don’t understand your father either. The awful things he says to you…”

“We finally have something in common. Rotten dads.”

“Not rotten,” Eiji says, but his protest is quiet. “I think maybe… some people do not hold regrets well. They let them spoil inside.”

“Not you,” says Ash. The ache in him is fine-toothed and rakes over all the places he swore weren’t tender anymore. He can’t imagine what kinds of regrets Eiji might have. He doesn’t want the burden of proof that they exist. But he knows they’ve got to be kinder than his own, and he knows, too, that Eiji has learned to wear them comfortably.

“And not you,” Eiji agrees.

“No?” He _feels_ like that sometimes—spoiled.

A gull swoops low over the tide and tries to pick at something. “Ash,” says Eiji—only that—and no one’s ever said his name like that, like it was a collection of essays instead of three arbitrary letters.

He shouldn’t get used to this. He can’t get used to this.

He closes his eyes and lets the wind rail at him. What a lonely place this is. But Griff had made it better. Eiji makes it better, too.

_What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things_ , Griff had once said on an afternoon much like this one: stinging, cautiously giving way to the dark. Griff, who thought words were stones to hold in his mouth until the taste permeated. Griff, whose warmth at least remained even when the words and mind and love of him hadn’t. _So we gave the clock a face… We gave the country a heart, the storm an eye, the cave a mouth so we could pass into safety._

“My brother’s dead,” he says, testing the reality of it.

And this time, Eiji doesn’t say his name or anything at all. He presses his knee to Ash’s like they are building a steeple out of their bodies. They huddle together until the absence of light boxes them in too wholly, no warmth left between their bones to share.


End file.
